Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Sun Bathers


"Reading at the Beach"
18x24
Oil on canvas

Above is a recent painting at Cavalier Gallery in Nantucket.  The beach is the perfect place for an artist interested in the figure.  All the models you could ask for posing for you unpaid. It can be hard working plien air and simplifying the scene to its essence.  This process is what I enjoy so much.  Looking around me and distilling the interior and exterior worlds.  I see the forms as physical but carting a spiritual mystery that no science can prove but our intellects tell us that there is something more to the world that what we see and feel.  Something behind the scenes. 


"Rainbow Umbrella"
11x14
Oil on panel
Jonathan MacAdam

These paintings for me carry that strange human weight.  The drama that a figure when placed in a landscape creates, and the questions that plague the philosopher What are we? What are we doing here? What is this strange reality that seems grows more unknowable with each generation as our knowledge grows. We are again and again stripped down and brought back to the beginning  and faced with  mortality and the question of a spirit.  As in the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare the artist has the stage and looks at the figures from afar and can see their simple fates.  There sun bathing seems as I beautiful enjoyment of the moment and an effort to slow down death. The love affairs of Summer's past hang there suspended.  Light itself we can hardly understand.  The physics are astounding.  We can't hide from it we can only see what it reveals; feel it's warmth; contemplate its journey from the sun itself. 


"Couple at the beach" 8x10 oil on panel